Barack Obama's Presidency Is Imploding

White House This has been a nightmare week for Barack Obama, without a doubt the worst of his presidency so far. Steven T. Miller, acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service has resigned over his agency's targeting of conservative groups, which even The Washington Post labeled this morning a "horror story". Yesterday Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder testified before the House Judiciary Committee on a host of issues including the Benghazi debacle, in what can only be described as a train wreck of a performance. Holder was simply unable or unwilling to answer most key questions, and demonstrated a level of contempt for elected officials in Congress that was breathtaking. It was yet another public relations disaster for the Obama team.

In addition the administration has come under heavy fire over the Justice Department's monitoring of phone records belonging to Associated Press journalists. All this has combined to create a perfect storm in the first year of Obama's second term, a wave of scandals that has been so damaging to the standing of this administration that even The New York Times today carries the headline on its front page: "An Onset of Woes Raises Questions on Obama Vision". When even the usually subservient inflight newspaper of Air Force One has doubts over the job the president is doing you know the situation is really desperate for The White House.

George F. Will, one of America's most influential political commentators, and a columnist for The Washington Post, believes there are "echoes of Watergate" in both the IRS and Benghazi scandals. As Will wrote earlier this week:

The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but40 years ago this week — May 17, 1973 — the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon's administration. Now the nature of Barack Obama's administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.

Will doesn't go as far as saying that Barack Obama will suffer the same fate as Nixon. After all, Obama benefits from a Senate controlled by the Democrats. But there is no denying the parallels between the sense of impunity in this White House and that of Richard Nixon's four decades ago. In fact it's considerably worse on many fronts.

Political analyst Michael Barone warned back in October 2008 of what he called "The Coming Liberal Thugocracy," referring to then Senator Obama's call for his supporters "to get in their face" when confronting Republicans and Independents. Barone argued at the time that "Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Mr. Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech they don't like and seem utterly oblivious to claims this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment."

Barone's predictions have been proved correct. As I've noted in previous pieces, this is a nasty, brutish, imperial-style presidency that is highly intolerant of dissent, and which goes out of its way to target political opponents. It is ironic that one of the journalists threatened by the Obama White House in recent months has been Bob Woodward, one of two Washington Post reporters who originally broke the Watergate scandal, and who was immortalised in the 1976 Oscar winner All The President's Men, where he was played by Robert Redford. Woodward was warned back in February by White House economic adviser Gene Sperling that he would "regret" remarks he made on the sequester issue. Other writers, including Bill Clinton's former special counsel Lanny Davis, have faced similar threats.

Is it any surprise that conservative groups have been targeted en masse by the federal government following the kind of deeply unpleasant rhetoric used by Vice President Joe Biden, who supported the charge by Democrat Congressman Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania that Tea Party Republicans had "acted like terrorists" over the debt issue? Biden has been a master of this kind of divisive, heated language, telling union members at an AFL-CIO rally in Detroit in September 2011 that "you are the only folks keeping the barbarians from the gates." At the same rally, Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa declared: "President Obama, this is your army, and we are ready to march. Everybody here's got a vote. If we go back, and we keep the eye on the prize, let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong." Needless to say, President Obama remained silent on both the Biden and Hoffa remarks, and in the following year called on his supporters to take "revenge" against Republicans at the ballot box.

This week, thanks to unprecedented levels of Congressional and mainstream media scrutiny of the actions of the Obama administration, the American people have been given a powerful insight into the way in which this presidency has operated. For far too long, the Obama administration has acted like an imperial court rather than a government that is accountable to the nation. The White House's culture of arrogance and impunity, coupled with a deeply unpleasant vindictiveness, is increasingly there for all to see. Suppression of political dissent, a callous disregard for the loss of American life in Benghazi, and the relentless rise of big government - these will be three of the most of enduring images of Barack Obama's imperial presidency.